Dear Editor,
This election is actually a choice between continuity and change. Con-tinuity, as outlined by the PPP/C, is a super-fast-build, state-led model on top of an oil boom—more megawatts, bridges, and buildings. That can deliver speed. It can also narrow everyday choice: once a mega-project starts, communities must live with it; prices heat up; private initiative is crowded to the margins; the political footprint grows while civic space thins.
The cost of living, due to the potentially dangerous pro-cyclical spending of the past few years, tells the truth, i.e., that new schools and hospitals matter, but families feel what happens inside them—teacher quality, learning, medicines, wait times. The manifesto is heavy on concrete, light on the system reforms that change daily experience. The continuity platform seems quite unbothered by this truth (or the cost of living, for that matter). Change, properly understood, is about rules. Elements in WIN’s platform—re-examining the PSA, ring-fencing, publishing contracts, stricter NRF discipline, alongside targeted household relief—speak to the plumbing of development: prices, risk and trust. Costing and phasing still matter.
But, on balance, these rule-of-the-game shifts sit closer to the development path Guyana needs. As I argued in an early article, “Imagination and Development,” imagination, entrepreneurship, and cooperation are production inputs. Development is not only concrete; it is how a society learns—how it rewards problem-solving and permits experimentation. That is the missing note: the policy imagination that expands people’s real choices.
Nowhere is the difference clearer than in sugar. We cannot pay forever for the past. The industry needs an advanced-biotechnology pivot—biorefinery platforms around the estates (cellulosic ethanol, specialty sugars and enzymes, cogeneration, co-products, even bioplastics precursors)—so public money buys capability, not permanent bailouts. In my ILO publication on the Socio-economic Impacts of the Closure of Sugar Estates in Guyana, I called this complementarities: turning estates into hubs of industrial symbiosis with skills, logistics, and finance aligned. That is real diversification—not raw-sugar nostalgia.
Two guardrails should frame any mandate. First, the Hartwick rule: invest resource rents so future consumption does not fall—made real through a medium-term fiscal anchor, hard savings rules, and value-for-money tests that expand choice, not dependency. Second, imagination: learning grants for schools, clinic-quality compacts, and an SME bank with open procurement and export facilitation—so capital becomes capability. Build fast, yes—but with guardrails. Spend, yes—but with imagination. Diversify by complements, not slogans. Do that, and people will notice what matters: more real choices in how they live, learn and work.